Insights from our Editorial Team

Dawn Roth Lindell became chief information officer (CIO) of the Western Area Power Administration (WAPA) in 2013. She helms the IT team as her main gig, but she’s also on the leadership team, which means she gets to “help shape the future of the organization,” she said.

The holidays are over. It’s time to start a new year with a new you and a new look ahead. We’re ready. Well, not quite. We still have one more peek at 2014—one final look back before we look forward. We present our 14 favorite utility tweets of 2014.

This list may not be exactly scientific. We paid attention to articles that garnered comments on social media, the chatter and how readers reacted. Part two covers the monsters of crowdsourcing, the biz model, zombies and even Godzilla.

It’s that time of the year again---time to reflect back in cutesy, numerical ways. CNN does it. So, we admit to caving to journalistic peer pressure and joining in. Part one covers data, regs, customer psychology and more.

For the past couple of years, we’ve been interviewing women across the power industry. Each had interesting insights into the industry and into how women fit in this industry—even advice on how women can conquer this industry. So, we gathered all the best advice from this series and put them all here in one handy spot.

The enormous volumes of intermittent generation have made the role of grid balancing ever more crucial, and this has given rise to a new breed of utility, one which points to the future, perhaps, for Europe’s behemoths.

Utilities will need to invest in the infrastructure and systems that will become the backbone of future markets. But more importantly, utilities will invest in people, industry knowledge, brainpower and application skills that come into work each day. Say what you will, but the architecture of our energy future still involves keeping our lights on and our devices running.

When I asked Sandy Fisher, director of electric systems project management at Pepco Holdings, Inc. (PHI), to tell me about her job, she said, “My current job is to make sure we get our large capital projects done on time, on budget and ultimately, do what we say we’re going to do.” When I asked her how she described her job to those outside of our industry, she added, “Well, I usually just tell them I’m an electrical engineer.”

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